Australian government and Labor opposition ignore the suffering of Australian Julian Assange. Can they afford to, as election looms?
If he dies, his death will have been caused by, among others, politicians in Australia who have the diplomatic power to bring him home,” Pilger said.“Scott Morrison, in particular, will have Julian’s life and suffering on his hands, along with those in the Labor opposition who have kept a cowardly silence.
Independent MP Andrew Wilkie, among others, has said that Scott Morrison must urge the US and Britain to release Assange and let him return to Australia.
the “noise” in parliament combined with more public awareness of Assange’s dire state may present a headache for the government as polls loom.
Saving Julian Assange, Last week, the British High Court ruled that Julian Assange can be extradited to face charges in the United States. His fiancée, Stella Moris, vows to continue the fight alongside his network of supporters. By Amy Fallon. https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2021/12/18/saving-julian-assange/163974600013099?fbclid=IwAR2dLaNxKG0FTyBvywjYpL_HpxPb8RWA6rF0mQwIE-X8Pnd8TMbAzkWed2Y#mt This week, Stella Moris said she and Julian Assange still intended to marry in the new year, although they have not set a date. She is currently speaking to the prison about arrangements. Moris hopes it will be a ceremony attended by close family and friends, with their children, Gabriel, 4, and Max, 2, taking part.
“The High Court ruling has made things even more precarious than before,” she tells The Saturday Paper.
“But that has only strengthened our determination to celebrate what is constant and certain in our lives – our love and support for each other.”
Moris is a South-African born lawyer and an activist in her own right. Her family were involved in the anti-apartheid battle. After the British High Court ruled that her fiancé could be extradited to the United States, her response was simple: “We will fight.”
“History will not spare them if we lose a man who is not only innocent of any crime but a genuine hero in the extraordinary public service he has performed for millions of people.”
She sees the case in these terms: “Every generation has an epic fight to fight, and this is ours, because Julian represents the fundamentals of what it means to live in a free society.”Last week’s decision was made after two of Britain’s most senior judges ruled Assange, earlier deemed a suicide risk, had received assurances from the US that he would not face the strictest measures before a trial or once convicted. They found a lower court had erred in offering him protection.
“That risk is in our judgement excluded by the assurances which are offered,” one of the judges, Lord Burnett, said. “It follows that we are satisfied that, if the assurances had been before the judge, she would have answered the relevant question differently.”
British Home Secretary Priti Patel must now approve Assange’s extradition. Lawyers for the 50-year-old are appealing the decision. Subsequent hearings are likely to raise the issue of free speech, which campaigners say is at the heart of the case involving the Walkley Award-winning journalist.Many around the world are now calling on the Australian government to intervene and save Assange’s life before it’s too late.
“There seem to be no limits to the savagery of the Anglosphere – US, UK, Australia – in exacting revenge for the crime of informing the population of what the powerful want to conceal,” the intellectual and activist Noam Chomsky later told The Saturday Paper.
He urged followers of Julian Assange, wanted by the US for breaking espionage laws after publishing hundreds of thousands of Afghanistan and Iraq war logs and diplomatic cables, to “get organised”.
“And act,” added Chomsky, because there was “not much time”.
Another two to three years may drag on before the extradition is resolved. Australian journalist John Pilger, who described Assange as “frail and skeletal” the last time he hugged his friend in 2020, said the fact he was still alive was remarkable.
Last weekend’s revelation, that Assange had suffered a stroke in October, didn’t shock the veteran reporter. A month earlier, a Yahoo News report revealed that the CIA allegedly planned to assassinate Assange.
“If he dies, his death will have been caused by, among others, politicians in Australia who have the diplomatic power to bring him home,” Pilger said.“Scott Morrison, in particular, will have Julian’s life and suffering on his hands, along with those in the Labor opposition who have kept a cowardly silence. History will not spare them if we lose a man who is not only innocent of any crime but a genuine hero in the extraordinary public service he has performed for millions of people.”
To Gabriel Shipton, Assange’s brother, Julian, is a “bad dancer” with a “dorky sense of humour”. But, he says, “he is very sweet with his children, very good with kids, and a very principled man”.
Shipton produced the recent documentary Ithaka, which tells the story of Gabriel and Julian’s father’s struggle to have Assange freed.“Often people lose sight that these are actual real people involved, not just a head on a screen, or a headline, that this is a person’s father, brother, partner,” Shipton says. “Once people find out about how tragic the actual injustice that Julian suffered [is], and through no fault of their own his family are suffering, they’re quite confronted that they’ve allowed it to carry on for as long as it has.”
Shipton concedes the fight is just as much or even more political than legal, and others echo this. “There is no doubt that [this] aggressive and relentless pursuit is driven by the US security and defence state,” said Greg Barns, a barrister and adviser to the Australian Assange campaign.
A bipartisan Australian Parliamentary Friends of the Bring Julian Assange Home group comprises 25 senators and MPs, but was adding “about one member or so monthly”, says Shipton. In the past week, Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce has spoken out against Assange being sent to the US. Independent MP Andrew Wilkie, among others, has said that Scott Morrison must urge the US and Britain to release Assange and let him return to Australia. The opposition has urged the government to encourage the US to close the matter, although it has not elaborated on what it means by this.According to Kellie Tranter, a Maitland-based lawyer, human rights activist, researcher and former WikiLeaks Party candidate, the “noise” in parliament combined with more public awareness of Assange’s dire state may present a headache for the government as polls loom.
“If the level of interest keeps increasing, the government may feel obliged to act as the Howard government did in the case of David Hicks,” she says, referring to the former Guantánamo Bay detainee. “The last thing the government wants is this case soaking up oxygen in place of its policies. It’s public criticism, which is exactly what they wanted to avoid in the case of Hicks.”Tranter points out that progressive campaign group GetUp! played a critical role in Hicks’s repatriation by making his detention by the US an election issue, mobilising public opinion against his mistreatment. They may be the only organisation capable of doing the same in this case, she said. GetUp! said they had no comment on Assange.
In Britain, Assange has admirers from all walks of life. Sadia Kokni, 40, is British-born with African, Indian and Middle Eastern heritage and the managing director of a cosmetics company. Despite having a disability, she attends twice-weekly protest vigils at the Australian high commission with “Team Assange”, comprising about 50 people, including bus drivers, graphic designers, nurses and artists.
“I campaign for nothing, I only campaign for Julian,” Kokni says. “Unlike when people campaign against a war – it’s a nation against a nation – when it comes to Julian it’s the most powerful nation in the world against one man and he’s exposing the atrocities of global governance and things that every living person should be aware of.”
Although Kokni acknowledges Assange’s predicament could be treated with greater urgency by the British parliament, she also feels disbelief over Australia’s inaction.“They could be doing a lot more, Australia. I find it ridiculous,” she said, singling out the high commissioner, George Brandis. “Brandis – what is he actually doing? Has he written any letters?”
The Australian high commission in Britain did not respond to requests for comment.
A free press, a free Julian Assange – would be the best gift for the world
Urgent need to correct exaggerated claims about China’s nuclear arsenal and its intentions.
In the months ahead, as the Biden administration attempts to draft a new Nuclear Posture Review and Congress votes on a proposed $715 defense bill for FY 2022, we can expect to hear a lot more about China’s “breathtaking” nuclear buildup. If we are to reduce the risks of nuclear war and lower the costs of nuclear weapons procurement, we must challenge such assertions and provide a balanced, realistic assessment of Chinese developments. We must also urge Biden to work with Xi in developing the “guardrails” that both agree are necessary to avert catastrophe.
Placing “Guardrails” on the US-China Nuclear Competition, A failure to challenge inflated claims about China’s nuclear arsenal will have serious and painful consequences. The Nation By Michael T. Klare , 1 Dec 21,
With the United States and China both speeding up the acquisition of new nuclear weapons, some analysts predicted that Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping would discuss limits on those munitions during their virtual summit on November 15. However, they barely touched on the matter, agreeing only that both sides should take steps to prevent the unintended escalation of future crises. As Biden told Xi during their three-hour exchange, the two sides need “commonsense guardrails to ensure that competition does not veer into conflict.” Yet no plans were made for negotiations leading to the adoption of such measures, so the US-China arms race will only gain further momentum.
Historically, talk of nuclear arms racing has applied almost exclusively to the United States and the Soviet Union, and now Russia. Indeed, the US and Russia still possess the overwhelming majority of the world’s nuclear warheads, along with its most advanced nuclear delivery systems. But now China—long a minor player in the nuclear arena—appears to be bolstering its capabilities, while the United States is developing new weapons with the Chinese, as well as the Russians, in mind. The risk of a war between the US and China has also been growing, especially due to tensions over Taiwan, increasing the danger of nuclear weapons use.
Fueling these dangerous trends is a steady stream of alarmist pronouncements by US officials about China’s nuclear buildup. The Chinese are engaged in a “remarkable expansion of [their] nuclear and strategic capabilities,” Adm. Charles A. Richard, commander of the US Strategic Command, told the House Armed Services Committee last April. As a result of these initiatives, “China is capable of executing any plausible nuclear employment strategy regionally now, and soon will be able to do so at intercontinental ranges.”
But while China is certainly undertaking the modernization of its relatively old and meager nuclear arsenal—as compared to those of Russia and the United States—it can hardly be described as undertaking a “remarkable expansion” of its arsenal nor is it capable of “executing any plausible nuclear employment strategy” in a US-China war. Yet these inflated claims by senior Pentagon officials are helping spur Congress—which doesn’t really require much nudging—to finance a vast expansion of America’s own nuclear capabilities.
A failure to challenge these inflated claims and to slow the burgeoning US-China nuclear competition will have serious and painful consequences for both sides. If nothing else, it will lead to the massive allocation of resources for nuclear weapons procurement, with no end in sight. Any hope of trimming the Pentagon’s proposed $1.7 trillion modernization of all three “legs” of the nuclear “triad”—intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and long-range strategic bombers—will disappear. And the emphasis on ever-more-capable conventional weapons, combined with new developments in cyber, space, and surveillance technology, will increase the likelihood that future crises trigger an unrestrained escalatory spiral terminating in nuclear annihilation.
Fortunately, the US-China nuclear arms race is still at a relatively early stage, at least when compared to the long-running US-Soviet/Russian competition. It is possible, then, to conceive of measures that might constrain this contest before it gathers additional momentum. Before considering such measures, however, we must possess a clear understanding of this dynamic and dispel various misconceptions regarding China’s nuclear capabilities.
UNDERSTANDING CHINA’S NUCLEAR POSTURE
For starters, bear in mind that China currently maintains a relatively modest nuclear arsenal. In its latest tally of world nuclear stockpiles, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) calculated that China possessed approximately 350 nuclear warheads—a bit more than the number deployed by France (290), but a very small fraction of the 5,550 warheads possessed by the US and the 6,375 by Russia. China has also chosen to limit its arsenal of nuclear delivery systems. According to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS), it has deployed only about 100 ICBMs and 48 SLBMs, compared to 400 ICBMs and 336 SLBMs in the US inventory. China also has a few dozen heavy bombers, but none with a range or nuclear payload comparable to the US B-2 and B-52 bombers.
That China maintains such a modest strategic arsenal has long provided confirmation for Beijing’s claim that it seeks nuclear armaments solely to implement a “minimum deterrence” posture—one that requires sufficient weapons to survive an enemy first strike and deliver intolerable damage on the attacker but not enough to conduct a disarming first strike on an adversary.
China’s arsenal has remained relatively unchanged for several decades, but now is being substantially modernized—allowing US military officials to claim that it is engaged in a major expansion along with a shift in its weapons employment doctrine. China’s nuclear arsenal is expanding at a“breathtaking” rate, Admiral Richard declared in August, and will soon achieve a “strategic breakout,” allowing Beijing to execute “any plausible nuclear strategy” it wishes to pursue……………
In sum, the evidence for a vast and rapid buildup in Chinese nuclear capabilities is underwhelming, to say the least. Also lacking is any indication that Beijing has abandoned its “minimum deterrence” strategy. What recent Chinese developments do suggest, however, is that Chinese officials fear that their existing nuclear force is becoming increasingly vulnerable to a first strike—sometimes called a “counterforce” strike—and so must be strengthened in order to safeguard its retaliatory capability.
US NUCLEAR INITIATIVES AND CHINA’S RESPONSE
In contrast to China, the United States has long maintained that its nuclear forces should be capable of many functions beyond just “minimum deterrence.” Current doctrine, as encapsulated in the Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) of 2018, states that nuclear weapons could be employed in response to an overwhelming conventional, as well as a nuclear, attack on the United States; even a major cyber assault on the United States might justify such usage…………….
| Under these circumstances, China’s nuclear buildup can largely be viewed as an attempt to overcome the vulnerabilities of its deterrence force, ensuring that enough of its weapons can survive an enemy first-strike assault and penetrate enemy defenses. This would explain both of the developments noted above: the replacement of single-warhead missiles with multiple-warhead variants and the construction of multiple silo holes in the desert. By equipping their ICBMs and SLBMs with a number of independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVed missiles, in Pentagon-speak), the Chinese evidently hope to ensure that even if only a few of their weapons escape American missile defenses, those survivors will still be able to launch multiple warheads against US targets; likewise, by constructing hundreds of additional silos and moving their ICBMs from one to the other on a random basis, they can circumvent a US first strike. None of this, however, suggests an intent to acquire a US-style counterforce capability. TAKING ACTION NOW As suggested by this analysis, China’s nuclear modernization does not pose the same sort of threat to the United States as US nuclear and conventional initiatives pose to China. True, China is capable of inflicting catastrophic damage on this country in the event of a nuclear war, but it does not appear to be seeking a first-strike or damage-limiting capacity akin to that possessed by the United States. Nevertheless, the danger of a US-China war is growing, and any major confrontation between US and Chinese forces could result in colossal losses on one or both sides, precipitating the early use of nuclear weapons. This is the perfect time, then, for the Biden administration to seek talks with Beijing aimed at eliminating or curtailing weapons developments that are placing both countries at greater risk. The goal—at least in the early stages of such engagement—should not be the adoption of conventional arms control agreements, like those signed between the US and the USSR during the Cold War era. Rather, the two sides should engage in high-level talks aimed at identifying the greatest risks of precipitous or unintended escalation, and in devising strategies for minimizing those dangers. (Reportedly, the Biden administration has been considering the initiation of such talks with China, but there is no indication that formal plans have yet been made to proceed with this.) Such high-level conversations—sometimes called “strategic stability” talks—could focus, for example, on the expected deployment on both sides of numerous hypersonic missiles aimed at each other’s high-value targets, and pursue ways to curtail their numbers or mode of employment, to minimize the risk of rapid escalation. Both sides could also agree to eschew cyberattacks on each other’s nuclear command-and-control systems, with the same goal in mind. Mutual restraints could also be crafted to reduce the danger of escalation during a crisis, for example through limitations on the scale of air and naval maneuvers in the area surrounding Taiwan. In the months ahead, as the Biden administration attempts to draft a new Nuclear Posture Review and Congress votes on a proposed $715 defense bill for FY 2022, we can expect to hear a lot more about China’s “breathtaking” nuclear buildup. If we are to reduce the risks of nuclear war and lower the costs of nuclear weapons procurement, we must challenge such assertions and provide a balanced, realistic assessment of Chinese developments. We must also urge Biden to work with Xi in developing the “guardrails” that both agree are necessary to avert catastrophe. https://www.thenation.com/article/world/china-nuclear-competition/ Michael T. Klare, The Nation’s defense correspondent, is professor emeritus of peace and world-security studies at Hampshire College and senior visiting fellow at the Arms Control Association in Washington, D.C. Most recently, he is the author of All Hell Breaking Loose: The Pentagon’s Perspective on Climate Change. |
Voices for a World Free of Nuclear Weapons Takes a New Approach With Informative Videos for Children and Young Adults
Voices for a World Free of Nuclear Weapons Takes a New Approach With Informative Videos for Children and Young Adults, https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/voices-for-a-world-free-of-nuclear-weapons-takes-a-new-approach-with-informative-videos-for-children-and-young-adults-301412004.htmlNov 01, 2021,
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 1, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Voices for a World Free of Nuclear Weapons, a Cooperation Circle of the United Religions Initiative, recently launched three nuclear disarmament videos for children and young adults. They are inviting educational institutions, religious communities, nuclear disarmament groups, and other grassroots organizations to post these videos on their websites and social media platforms.
“We realized there was a lack of educational videos about the threats of nuclear weapons for children and young adults. So, the Education Team at Voices decided to take it on. We produced videos that would inform children in an age-appropriate manner, as well as the general public, on this important topic.” said Carolyn MacKenzie, Voices Education Team Lead.
“Many children and young adults know nothing about nuclear weapons. Yet, they pose one of the greatest threats to all life on earth. We wanted to inform youth about nuclear weapons, and also inspire them to get involved by taking simple actions that will allow them to be the change that is needed,” said MacKenzie.
Voices’ goal is for these videos to be widely shared around the world. We recognize we cannot do this alone which is why we are inviting other nuclear disarmament and grassroots groups to give these videos a permanent home on their websites.
The Threat of Nuclear Weapons – A Call to Action Video = 10:54 minutes
Appropriate for young adults and the public.
Description: Brief summary of nuclear weapons history and why we all need to work to eliminate these weapons. Also includes a call to action and a description of what interested individuals can do help the cause.
Captain No-NukesAnimation = 3 minutes
Appropriate for children ages 8 and under.
Description: Short animation of Captain No-Nukes working to rid the world of nuclear weapons with concrete suggestions about how children can help.
The Evolution of Weapons in the World Animation = 1:15 minute
Appropriate for children of all ages.
Description: Brief animation on the history of conflicts and how to solve problems non-violently.
Voices for a World Free of Nuclear Weapons is part of United Religions Initiative (URI), the largest grassroots interfaith network in the world. URI builds bridges by encouraging members to work together on practical projects that enhance civil communities and promote understanding between people of different religious and cultural traditions.
Contact : Julie Schelling
322397@email4pr.com
P: 347.719.1518
Australian TV blatantly advertises weapons sales, in absurd claims about China invading Australia
Australian War Propaganda Goes Off the Rails https://consortiumnews.com/2021/11/17/australian-war-propaganda-goes-off-the-rails/ November 17, 2021 In a blatant advert for arms sales masquerading as news, 60 Minutes tries to tie Taiwan to the fantasy of China randomly invading a continent of white foreigners thousands of miles away, writes Caity Johnstone. By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com
60 Minutes Australia has churned out yet another fear-mongering war propaganda piece on China, this one so ham-fisted in its call to beef up military spending that it goes so far as to run a brazen advertisement for an actual Australian weapons manufacturer disguised as news reporting.
This round of psychological conformity-making features Australian former major general Jim “The Butcher of Fallujah” Molan saying that in three to ten years a war will be fought against China over Taiwan and that Australians are going to have to fight in that war to prevent a future Chinese invasion of the land down under.
He argues Australia will need to greatly increase its military spending in order to accomplish this, because it can’t be certain the United States will protect it from Chinese aggression.
“Australia is monstrously vulnerable at the moment; we have this naive faith that American military power is infinite, and it’s not,” says Molan, who is a contributor to government/arms industry-funded think tanks Lowy Institute and Australian Strategic Policy Institute.
Decrying what he calls “panda huggers” (meaning people who aren’t China hawks), Molan claims that “the Chinese Communist Party’s aim is to be dominant in this region and perhaps dominant in the world.” Asked when war might break out, he claims “Given the power that they have in their military they could act any time from now on, and that’s what frightens me more than anything.”
“The next war is not going to be ten or twenty years away, it’s going to be in the next three to ten years,” Molan asserts.
“My estimate is that in a serious fight the Australian Defense Force only has enough missiles for days. This is not going to be resolved in days. And of course we’re not big enough. We should expand the defense force significantly… We should fund defense now based on our assessment of the national security strategy which is based on the war that we want to win.”
“In short do you think Australia needs to prepare for war tomorrow?” the interviewer asks Molan.
“Absolutely,” he replies.
Molan makes the ridiculous argument that if Australia does not to commit to defending Taiwan from the mainland then it won’t be long before they can expect a Chinese invasion at home, as though there’s any line that could be drawn between the resolution to a decades-old Chinese civil war and China deciding to invade a random continent full of white foreigners thousands of miles away.
Suppose we said okay Taiwan you’re on your own up there and the Chinese snapped it up, and the Chinese started looking around the world and they might snap up other liberal democracies like Australia,” Molan argues. “And we might then turn to America and say America well could you give us a bit of a hand here? And the Americans might say what we said to Taiwan. Where do you draw the line? This situation that is developing now is an existential threat to Australia as a liberal democracy.”
Incredibly, the 60 Minutes segment then plunges into several minutes of blatant advertising for Australian defense technology company Defendtex which manufactures weaponized drones designed to be used in clusters, saying such systems could handily be used to defeat China militarily in a cost-effective manner.
The segment also promotes bare-faced lies which have become commonplace in anti-China propaganda, repeating the false claim that Chinese fighter planes have been “breaching Taiwanese airspace” and repeating a mistranslation of comments by Xi Jinping which it used in a previous anti-China segment made to sound more aggressive than they actually were.
This segment follows a cartoonishly hysterical fear porn piece on China put out by the same program this past September which featured Australian Strategic Policy Institute ghouls insisting that Australians must be prepared to fight and die in defense of Taiwan and that a Chinese invasion of Australia is a very real threat. That 60 Minutes segment was preceded by an equally crazy one in May which branded New Zealand “New Xi-Land” for refusing to perfectly align with U.S. dictates on one small foreign policy issue.
To be perfectly clear, there is no evidence of any kind that China will ever have any interest in an unprovoked attack on Australia, much less an invasion, and attempts to tie that imaginary nonsense threat to Beijing’s interest in an island right off its coast which calls itself the Republic of China are absurd.
As we’ve discussed previously, anyone who’d support entering into a war against China over Taiwan is a crazy idiot. In the unfortunate event that tensions between Beijing and Taipei cannot be resolved peacefully in the future there is no justification whatsoever for the U.S. and its allies to enter into a world war between nuclear powers to determine who governs Taiwan.
The cost-to-benefit ratio in a conflict which would easily kill tens of millions and could lead to the deaths of billions if it goes nuclear makes such a war very, very, very far from being worth entering into, especially since there’s no actual evidence that Beijing has any interest in attacking nations it doesn’t see as Chinese territory.
There’s so much propaganda going toward generating China hysteria in westerners generally and Australians in particular, and it’s been depressingly successful toward that end.
Watching these mass-scale psyops take control of people’s minds one after another has been like watching a zombie outbreak in real time; people’s critical thinking faculties just fall out their ears and then all of a sudden they’re all about cranking up military spending and sending other people’s kids off to die defending U.S. interests in some island.
Please don’t become a zombie. Keep your brain. Stay conscious.
America’s relentless pursuit of Australian Julian Assange is a threat to any journalist who might expose a USA massacre of civilians
Julian Assange currently sits in Belmarsh Prison waiting to find out if British judges will overturn a lower court’s ruling against his extradition to the United States to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for journalistic activity which exposed U.S. war crimes. War crimes not unlike those that were just exposed by The New York Times in its reporting on the Baghuz massacre.
The precedent the U.S. government is trying to set with its persecution of Assange will, if successful, cast a chilling effect over journalism which scrutinizes the U.S. war machine, not just in the United States but around the world.
Syria Massacre Coverup Shows Danger of Assange Precedent, https://consortiumnews.com/2021/11/15/syria-massacre-coverup-shows-danger-of-assange-precedent/ November 15, 2021 The precedent the U.S. government is trying to set with its persecution of Assange will, if successful, cast a chilling effect over journalism which scrutinizes the U.S. war machine, writes Caity Johnstone. By Caitlin Johnstone
CaitlinJohnstone.com The New York Times has published a very solid investigative report on a U.S. military coverup of a 2019 massacre in Baghuz, Syria which killed scores of civilians. This would be the second investigative report on civilian-slaughtering U.S. airstrikes by The New York Times in a matter of weeks, and if I were a more conspiracy-minded person I’d say the paper of record appears to have been infiltrated by journalists.
The report contains many significant revelations, including that the U.S. military has been grossly undercounting the numbers of civilians killed in its airstrikes and lying about it to Congress, that special ops forces in Syria have been consistently ordering airstrikes which kill noncombatants with no accountability by exploiting loopholes to get around rules meant to protect civilians, that units which call in such airstrikes are allowed to do their own assessments grading whether the strikes were justified, that the U.S. war machine attempted to obstruct scrutiny of the massacre “at nearly every step” of the way, and that the Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations only investigates such incidents when there is “potential for high media attention, concern with outcry from local community/government, concern sensitive images may get out.”
“But at nearly every step, the military made moves that concealed the catastrophic strike,” The New York Times reports. “The death toll was downplayed. Reports were delayed, sanitized and classified. United States-led coalition forces bulldozed the blast site. And top leaders were not notified.”
Journalist Aaron Maté has called the incident “one of the U.S. military’s worst massacres and cover-up scandals since My Lai in Vietnam.”
Asked by the Times for a statement, Central Command gave the laughable justification that maybe those dozens of women and children killed in repeated bomb blasts were actually armed enemy combatants:
“This week, after The New York Times sent its findings to U.S. Central Command, which oversaw the air war in Syria, the command acknowledged the strikes for the first time, saying 80 people were killed but the airstrikes were justified. It said the bombs killed 16 fighters and four civilians. As for the other 60 people killed, the statement said it was not clear that they were civilians, in part because women and children in the Islamic State sometimes took up arms.“
I mean, how do you even address a defense like that? How do you get around the “Maybe those babies were ISIS fighters” defense?
Reading the report it becomes apparent how much inertia was thrown on attempts to bring the massacre to light and how easy it would have been for those attempts to succumb to the pressure and just give up, which naturally leads one to wonder how many other such incidents never see the light of day because attempts to expose them are successfully ground to a halt.
The Times says the Baghuz massacre “would rank third on the military’s worst civilian casualty events in Syria if 64 civilian deaths were acknowledged,” but it’s clear that that “acknowledged” bit is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
And it really makes you appreciate how much work goes into getting information like this in front of the public eye, and how important it is to do so, and how tenuous the ability to do so currently is.
Julian Assange currently sits in Belmarsh Prison waiting to find out if British judges will overturn a lower court’s ruling against his extradition to the United States to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act for journalistic activity which exposed U.S. war crimes. War crimes not unlike those that were just exposed by The New York Times in its reporting on the Baghuz massacre.
The precedent the U.S. government is trying to set with its persecution of Assange will, if successful, cast a chilling effect over journalism which scrutinizes the U.S. war machine, not just in the United States but around the world.
If it can succeed in legally establishing that it can extradite an Australian journalist for publishing information in the public interest about U.S. war crimes, it will have succeeded in legally establishing that it can do that to any journalist anywhere. And you can kiss investigative reporting like this goodbye.
This is what’s at stake in the Assange case. Our right to know what the most deadly elements of the most powerful government on our planet are doing. The fact that the drivers of empire think it is legitimate to deprive us of such information by threatening to imprison anyone who tries to show it to us makes them an enemy of all humanity.
”Deep fakes”: corruption of data has worrying implications for nuclear policy
Deep fakes: The next digital weapon with worrying implications for nuclear policy Sylvia Mishra |New Tech Nuclear Officer, 3 Nov 21, The past decade has witnessed the unprecedented march of technology and the opportunities, dangers, and disruptions that accompany it. In the last 4-5 years, a synthetic media technology (that uses machine learning techniques and is created by generative adversarial networks – GANs) known as deep fakes, has revolutionised the ways that digital media can be altered. The ability of state and non-state actors to generate, forge, and manipulate media has created clickbait headlines and fake news, ‘terrorised women’ by substituting faces to create fake porn, and abetted the spread of misinformation and disinformation. An opinion piece in the Washington Post has called this worrying trend of mass-scale manipulation the “democratisation of forgery”.
One of the disquieting ramifications of this emerging and disruptive technology (EDT) is the challenge it poses to nuclear weapons decision-making, in particular its impact on decision-makers and wider society, Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications (NC3), nuclear doctrine, posturing and signalling.
Implications for nuclear weapons decision-making
In the 21st century, nuclear weapons decision-making is markedly different from that of the Cold War era. As great power competition has come back into sharper focus, countries are expanding and upgrading their nuclear arsenals and moving towards incorporating EDTs for warfighting. On the one hand, the political divide between nuclear haves and have-nots is widening and, on the other, the pursuit of EDTs by non-nuclear states is reducing the technology gap between nuclear and non-nuclear states. Simultaneously, arms control is waning. These developments are taking place at a time when trust among states and decision-makers is fast eroding, and generational divides among decision-makers are increasing. For example, senior decision-makers may find themselves lacking knowledge about new EDTs and technical know-how, while younger decision-makers might lack the understanding of nuclear policy-making compressed timelines.
The ability of deep fakes to undermine the confidence in information analysis and outputs provided by digital security platforms can erode trust among states and, in turn, complicate nuclear weapons decision-making, making it difficult for decision-makers to make distinctions between correct and spurious information. Deep fakes expert and computer science professor at Dartmouth University, Hany Farid stated, “The things that keep me up at night these days are the ability to create a fake video and audio of a world leader saying ”I’ve launched nuclear weapons”. He adds that the technology to do this exists today
As we witness rapid advancements of deep fake technology, nuclear weapons policy decision-makers are likely to be faced with questions like “will deep fakes undermine understanding about enemy intent and misdirect about an adversary capability?” Furthermore, deep fakes may cause algorithms that offer information on situational awareness to misclassify based on altered inputs. Such scenarios may cause a breakdown in automated NC3 architecture bearing serious consequences.
With the corruption and poisoning of data, can adversaries take undue advantage and engage in nuclear brinkmanship? Can non-state actors create misperception and escalation by generating fake videos of a leader suggesting that they have deployed nuclear weapons against an adversary? Even if such fake videos can be quickly detected, it is highly likely that once these videos go online they will sow the seeds of widespread uncertainty.
During crises, the general population might find it difficult to tell factual from spurious information, exacerbating the situation. …………..
In a report titled ‘Weapons of Mass Distortion’, King’s College London’s Marina Favaro classifies deep fake as a ‘weapon of mass distortion’, arguing that it is capable of reducing situational awareness of a country and could erode Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications (NC3)………………. https://www.europeanleadershipnetwork.org/commentary/deep-fakes-the-next-digital-weapon-with-worrying-implications-for-nuclear-policy/
Chris Hedges: The Assange case is the most important battle for press freedom in our time
Chris Hedges: The Assange case is the most important battle for press freedom in our time, Rt.com29 Oct, 2021
If the WikiLeaks founder is extradited and found guilty of publishing classified material, it will set a legal precedent that will effectively end national security reporting.
For the past two days, I have been watching the extradition hearing for Julian Assange via video link from London. The United States is appealing a lower court ruling that denied the US request to extradite Assange not, unfortunately, because in the eyes of the court he is innocent of a crime, but because, as Judge Vanessa Baraitser in January concluded, Assange’s precarious psychological state would deteriorate given the “harsh conditions” of the inhumane US prison system, “causing him to commit suicide.” The United States has charged Assange with 17 counts under the Espionage Act and one count of trying to hack into a government computer, charges that could see him imprisoned for 175 years.
Assange, with long white hair, appeared on screen the first day from the video conference room in HM Prison Belmarsh. He was wearing a white shirt with an untied tie around his neck. He looked gaunt and tired. He did not appear in court, the judges explained, because he was receiving a “high dose of medication.” On the second day he was apparently not present in the prison’s video conference room.
Assange is being extradited because his organization WikiLeaks released the Iraq War Logs in October 2010, which documented numerous US war crimes – including video images of the gunning down of two Reuters journalists and 10 other unarmed civilians in the ‘Collateral Murder’ video, the routine torture of Iraqi prisoners, the covering up of thousands of civilian deaths and the killing of nearly 700 civilians that had approached too closely to US checkpoints. He is also being targeted by US authorities for other leaks, especially those that exposed the hacking tools used by the CIA known as Vault 7, which enables the spy agency to compromise cars, smart TVs, web browsers, and the operating systems of most smart phones, as well as operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, macOS, and Linux.
If Assange is extradited and found guilty of publishing classified material, it will set a legal precedent that will effectively end national security reporting, allowing the government to use the Espionage Act to charge any reporter who possesses classified documents, and any whistleblower who leaks classified information.
If the appeal by the United States is accepted, Assange will be retried in London. The ruling on the appeal is not expected until at least January.
Assange’s September 2020 trial painfully exposed how vulnerable he has become after 12 years of detention, including seven in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He has in the past attempted suicide by slashing his wrists. He suffers from hallucinations and depression, takes antidepressant medication and the antipsychotic quetiapine. After he was observed pacing his cell until he collapsed, punching himself in the face, and banging his head against the wall, he was transferred for several months to the medical wing of the Belmarsh prison. Prison authorities found “half of a razor blade” hidden under his socks. He has repeatedly called the suicide hotline run by the Samaritans because he thought about killing himself “hundreds of times a day.”
James Lewis, the lawyer for the United States, attempted to discredit the detailed and disturbing medical and psychological reports on Assange presented to the court in September 2020, painting him instead as a liar and malingerer. He excoriated the decision of Judge Baraitser to bar extradition, questioned her competence, and breezily dismissed the mountains of evidence that high-security prisoners in the United States, like Assange, subjected to Special Administrative Measures (SAMs), and held in virtual isolation in supermax prisons, suffer psychological distress. He charged Dr. Michael Kopelman, emeritus professor of neuropsychiatry at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience, King’s College London, who examined Assange and testified for the defense, with deception for “concealing” that Assange fathered two children with his fiancée, Stella Moris while in refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. He said that, should the Australian government request Assange, he could serve his prison time in Australia, his home country, after his appeals had been exhausted, but stopped short of promising that Assange would not be held in isolation or subject to SAMs…………………
There is no legal basis to hold Assange in prison. There is no legal basis to try him, an Australian citizen, under the US Espionage Act. The CIA spied on Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy through a Spanish company, UC Global, contracted to provide embassy security. This spying included recording the privileged conversations between Assange and his lawyers as they discussed his defense. This fact alone invalidated the trial. Assange is being held in a high security prison so the state can, as Nils Melzer, the UN special rapporteur on torture, has testified, continue the degrading abuse and torture it hopes will lead to his psychological if not physical disintegration. The architects of imperialism, the masters of war, the corporate-controlled legislative, judicial and executive branches of government and their obsequious courtiers in the media, are guilty of egregious crimes. Say this simple truth and you are banished, as many of us have been, to the margins of the media landscape. Prove this truth, as Assange, Chelsea Manning, Jeremy Hammond, and Edward Snowden have by allowing us to peer into the inner workings of power, and you are hunted down and persecuted.
Assange’s “crime” is that he exposed the more than 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians. He exposed the torture and abuse of some 800 men and boys, aged between 14 and 89, at Guantánamo. He exposed that Hillary Clinton in 2009 ordered US diplomats to spy on UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon and other UN representatives from China, France, Russia, and the UK, spying that included obtaining DNA, iris scans, fingerprints, and personal passwords, part of the long pattern of illegal surveillance that included eavesdropping on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan in the weeks before the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003. He exposed that Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the CIA orchestrated the June 2009 military coup in Honduras that overthrew the democratically-elected president, Manuel Zelaya, replacing him with a murderous and corrupt military regime. He exposed that George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and General David Petraeus prosecuted a war in Iraq that, under post-Nuremberg laws, is defined as a criminal war of aggression, a war crime, which authorized hundreds of targeted assassinations, including those of US citizens in Yemen. He exposed that the United States secretly launched missile, bomb, and drone attacks on Yemen, killing scores of civilians. He exposed that Goldman Sachs paid Hillary Clinton $657,000 to give talks, a sum so large it can only be considered a bribe, and that she privately assured corporate leaders she would do their bidding while promising the public financial regulation and reform. He exposed the internal campaign to discredit and destroy British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn by members of his own party. He exposed how the hacking tools used by the CIA and the National Security Agency permit the wholesale government surveillance of our televisions, computers, smartphones, and anti-virus software, allowing the government to record and store our conversations, images, and private text messages, even from encrypted apps.
He exposed the truth. He exposed it over and over and over until there was no question of the endemic illegality, corruption, and mendacity that defines the global ruling elite. And for these truths alone he is guilty. https://www.rt.com/op-ed/538822-assange-battle-for-press-freedom/#comment-5589120643
Bizarre twists in USA’s war on Julian Assange and Wikileaks
Britain’s Guantanamo: is Julian Assange a terrorist? https://www.michaelwest.com.au/britains-guantanamo-is-julian-assange-a-terrorist/ By Gary Lord|October 18, 2021
As Julian Assange prepares to face a British court for possibly the last time, threatened with up to 175 years detention in a US supermax prison, journalist Gary Lord, explores the latest bizarre twists in the US effort to extradite the Wikileaks founder and the silence of global media.
Julian Assange likes to say that censorship is “always an opportunity” that should be welcomed because it indicates that “there is something worth looking at”. He also says that it is a sign of weakness because it “reveals a fear of reform”.
So it’s interesting that recent bombshell stories about Assange himself are being censored by global media giants. As the WikiLeaks founder prepares to face a British court for possibly the last time on October 27, threatened with up to 175 years detention in a US supermax prison, perhaps this media censorship is something worth looking at?
wo major stories have emerged since a UK judge ruled against Assange’s extradition to the United States (on health grounds only) at the start of this year.
Firstly, Icelandic media revealed in June that the US prosecution’s prize witness, a convicted pedophile and fraudster who has since been jailed, had withdrawn his testimony against Assange.
Sigurdur Thordarson, who worked for Wikileaks in 2010 but embezzled over $50,000 from the organization, admitted to fabricating key accusations in the US indictment. This important story was almost totally ignored by global media.
Secondly, some 30 anonymous US officials recently confirmed that CIA boss Mike Pompeo, US President Donald Trump, and other staff “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration actively discussed assassinating Julian Assange, and even enlisted UK government support to shoot out airplane tyres if required.
The US government officially designated WikiLeaks a “non-state hostile intelligence service” in order to provide legal cover for any violent action, with “sketches” including possible shootouts with Russian agents on the streets of inner London.
The USA’s FAIR media watch group investigated the extraordinary lack of media coverage this astonishing revelation received, noting that “BBC News, one of the most-read news outlets in the world, appears to have covered the story just once — in the Somali-language section of the BBC website”.
The New York Times, the Washington Post, and many other major media outlets totally ignored it. The Guardian published just two articles about it; by comparison, they devoted 16 articles to alleged Russian government attempts to murder Alexei Navalny.
Sadly, this media censorship of Assange is not new, even if it does appear to be reaching new heights of absurdity. Another widely ignored story is the relentless and invasive spying on Assange and his visitors – including lawyers, family and journalists – while he was in the Ecuadorian embassy.
A Spanish court is currently investigating allegations that UC Global, the company that supposedly provided “security” at the behest of the Ecuadorian government, was secretly working for the CIA as a client of former Las Vegas casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, a major supporter of Donald Trump.
Max Blumenthal first reported back in May 2020 that these spies also discussed plots to kidnap or poison Assange.
A “fix” or media apathy?
How to explain the widespread lack of mainstream media interest in such shocking news stories which could easily be given front page importance?
Are we to assume that “the fix is in”? Is this part of a deliberate effort to suppress public support for Assange, ahead of his inevitable extradition? If so, who is behind it, and what does it say about the politicisation of the British court system, never mind global media organisations? If not, how else can we understand it?
It’s well known that Assange fell out with many of his old media partners following the 2010 Cablegate publications, but most of those journalists still argue that the Australian should not be extradited for the “crime” of journalism.
Editorials in the Guardian, New York Times, the Sydney Morning Herald and other newspapers have called for the US extradition case to be dropped. But the media fraternity’s “support” for Assange has never extended to a full-blown campaign, such as we saw when (for example) Peter Greste was jailed.
In fact, there has been a remarkable lack of Western media interest in Assange’s court case – coupled with smears, lies and poor reporting – for over a decade.
Italian journalist Sefania Maurizi, who has worked closely with WikiLeaks for many years, appears to be the only journalist who bothered to lodge Freedom of Information requests about the Assange case with the British and Swedish governments.
A “non-state hostile intelligence service”
She discovered that the Crown Prosecuting Service, which was then controlled by Sir Keir Starmer (now UK Labour Party leader), advised Swedish prosecutors not to come and question Assange in London, and not to “get cold feet” and close the case. “Please do not think this case is being dealt with as just another extradition,” they wrote – then they deleted all their emails!
In Australia, lawyer Kellie Tranter has been putting Aussie journos to shame by lodging her own FOI applications and sharing the results. Maurizi also has FOI applications lodged with the Australian and US governments, but they have been stalled for years with no explanation.
Assange and WikiLeaks still enjoy huge public support around the world. So why don’t big media organisations want more online clicks from readers digging into these amazing stories?
A clue may come from the CIA’s determination to get WikiLeaks officially designated a “non-state hostile intelligence service”. This legal designation would surely make media reporting on WikiLeaks the subject of increased government attention and maybe even censorship.
All the AUKUS countries have now adopted extreme new “anti-terror” laws that include Orwellian restrictions on the media. Maybe it’s time for AUKUS journalists to ask whether WikiLeaks is also officially designated a “non-state hostile intelligence service” in Canberra and London?
Is it possible that Julian Assange – who has been held in “Britain’s Guantanamo Bay” since 11 April 2019 – has been secretly defined as some new form of “information terrorist“? And if so, would our media today even be allowed to report it? Gary Lord is the author of Julian Assange biography “Wikileaks: a True History“
Deathly Silence: Journalists Who Mocked Assange Have Nothing to Say About CIA Plans to Kill Him
Deathly Silence: Journalists Who Mocked Assange Have Nothing to Say About CIA Plans to Kill Him https://fair.org/home/deathly-silence-journalists-who-mocked-assange-have-nothing-to-say-about-cia-plans-to-kill-him/, JOHN MCEVOY,YAHOO! NEWS (9/26/21) A BOMBSHELL REPORT DETAILING THE US CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY’S “SECRET WAR PLANS AGAINST WIKILEAKS,” INCLUDING CLANDESTINE PLOTS TO KILL OR KIDNAP PUBLISHER JULIAN ASSANGE WHILE HE TOOK REFUGE IN THE ECUADORIAN EMBASSY IN LONDON.
Following WikiLeaks‘ publication of the Vault 7 files in 2017—the largest leak in CIA history, which exposed how US and UK intelligence agencies could hack into household devices—the US government designated WikiLeaks as a “non-state hostile intelligence service” (The Hill, 4/13/17), providing legal cover to target the organization as if it were an adversarial spy agency.
Within this context, the Donald Trump administration reportedly requested “sketches” or “options” for how to kill Assange, according to the Yahoo! expose (written by Zach Dorfman, Sean D. Naylor and Michael Isikoff), while the CIA drew up plans to kidnap him. (Assange was expelled from the embassy in 2019 and has since then been in British prison, fighting a demand that he be extradited to the US to face charges of espionage—FAIR.org, 11/13/20.)
Shortly after publication, former CIA director Mike Pompeo (Yahoo! News, 9/29/21) seemed to confirm the report’s findings, declaring that the former US intelligence officials who spoke with Yahoo! “should all be prosecuted for speaking about classified activity inside the CIA.”
Ghoulish indifference
It would seem that covert plans for the state-sanctioned murder on British soil of an award-winning journalist should attract sustained, wall-to-wall media coverage.
The news, however, has been met by Western establishment media with ghoulish indifference—a damning indictment of an industry that feverishly condemns attacks on press freedom in Official Enemy states.
BBC News, one of the most-read news outlets in the world, appears to have covered the story just once—in the Somali-language section of the BBC website (Media Lens on Twitter, 9/30/21).
Neither the New York Times or Washington Post, two of the world’s leading corporate news organizations, have published any articles about Assange since July 2021.
To its credit, since the story first broke on September 26, the Guardian has reported twice on the CIA-led conspiracy to kill or kidnap Assange. But to offer perspective, during the week after Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny was reported to have been poisoned by the Russian government, the Guardian published 16 separate pieces on the issue, including video reports and opinion pieces.
Similarly, a Nexis search of British newspapers for the word “Navalny” brings up 288 results from August 20–25, 2020. The same search for “Assange” between September 26–October 1, 2021, brings up a meager 29 results—one of which, a notable exception, was a Patrick Cockburn piece in the Independent (10/1/21).
Crucial relief
As is typical of stories that embarrass the Western intelligence services, independent media provided crucial relief to the backdrop of chilling indifference, with the Grayzone’s Aaron Maté (YouTube, 9/30/21) conducting a rigorous interview with one of the report’s authors, Michael Isikoff.
Indeed, the Grayzone (5/14/20) was the first outlet to provide evidence of a CIA-linked proposal to “kidnap or poison Assange” in May 2020. The story, however, was almost universally ignored, suggesting that, as Joe Lauria wrote in Consortium News (10/2/21), “until something appears in the mainstream media, it didn’t happen.”
One thing the corporate media cannot be accused of with regards to Assange, however, is inconsistency. After a key witness in the Department of Justice’s case against the publisher admitted to providing the US prosecution with false testimony, a detail that should
ordinarily turn a case to dust, the corporate media responded by ignoring the story almost entirely. As Alan MacLeod wrote for FAIR.org (7/2/21):
The complete uniformity with which corporate media have treated this latest bombshell news raises even more concerns about how fundamentally intertwined and aligned they are with the interests of the US government.
Even after it was revealed that the UC Global security firm that targeted Assange had also spied on journalists at the Washington Post and New York Times, neither outlet mounted any
protest (Grayzone, 9/18/20).
Perhaps most remarkably, UK judge Vanessa Baraitser relied on a falsified CNN report (7/15/19) to justify the CIA’s spying operation against Assange (Grayzone, 5/1/21). Now, CNN’s website contains no reports on the agency’s plans to kill or kidnap Assange.
The prevailing silence has extended into the NGO industry. Amnesty International, which refused in 2019 to consider Assange a prisoner of conscience, has said nothing about the latest revelations. Likewise, Index on Censorship, which describes itself as “The Global Voice of Free Expression,” hasn’t responded to the story.
The establishment media’s dismissal of Assange supports Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky’s framework of “worthy” and “unworthy” political dissidents, with Assange situated firmly in the latter camp.
The present circumstances become even more deplorable upon consideration of the corporate journalists who arrogantly diminished, or even delighted in, Assange’s concerns for his own safety.
Continue readingThe CIA Plot to Kidnap or Kill Julian Assange in London is a Story that is Being Mistakenly Ignored
The CIA Plot to Kidnap or Kill Julian Assange in London is a Story that is Being Mistakenly Ignored https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/10/05/the-cia-plot-to-kidnap-or-kill-julian-assange-in-london-is-a-story-that-is-being-mistakenly-ignored/?fbclid=IwAR3t BY PATRICK COCKBURN 5 October 21, Three years ago, on 2 October 2018, a team of Saudi officials murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. The purpose of the killing was to silence Khashoggi and to frighten critics of the Saudi regime by showing that it would pursue and punish them as though they were agents of a foreign power.
It was revealed this week that a year before the Khashoggi killing in 2017, the CIA had plotted to kidnap or assassinate Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, who had taken refuge five years earlier in the Ecuador embassy in London. A senior US counter-intelligence official said that plans for the forcible rendition of Assange to the US were discussed “at the highest levels” of the Trump administration. The informant was one of more than 30 US officials – eight of whom confirmed details of the abduction proposal – quoted in a 7,500-word investigation by Yahoo News into the CIA campaign against Assange.
The plan was to “break into the embassy, drag [Assange] out and bring him to where we want”, recalled a former intelligence official. Another informant said that he was briefed about a meeting in the spring of 2017 at which President Trump had asked if the CIA could assassinate Assange and provide “options” about how this could be done. Trump has denied that he did so.
The Trump-appointed head of the CIA, Mike Pompeo, said publicly that he would target Assange and WikiLeaks as the equivalent of “a hostile intelligence service”. Apologists for the CIA say that freedom of the press was not under threat because Assange and the WikiLeaks activists were not real journalists. Top intelligence officials intended to decide themselves who is and who is not a journalist, and lobbied the White House to redefine other high-profile journalists as “information brokers”, who were to be targeted as if they were agents of a foreign power.
Among those against whom the CIA reportedly wanted to take action were Glenn Greenwald, a founder of the Intercept magazine and a former Guardian columnist, and Laura Poitras, a documentary film-maker. The arguments for doing so were similar to those employed by the Chinese government for suppressing dissent in Hong Kong, which has been much criticised in the West. Imprisoning journalists as spies has always been the norm in authoritarian countries, such as Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Egypt, while denouncing the free press as unpatriotic is a more recent hallmark of nationalist populist governments that have taken power all over the world.
It is possible to give only a brief precis of the extraordinary story exposed by Yahoo News, but the journalists who wrote it – Zach Dorfman, Sean D Naylor and Michael Isikoff – ought to scoop every journalistic prize. Their disclosures should be of particular interest in Britain because it was in the streets of central London that the CIA was planning an extra-judicial assault on an embassy, the abduction of a foreign national, and his secret rendition to the US, with the alternative option of killing him. These were not the crackpot ideas of low-level intelligence officials, but were reportedly operations that Pompeo and the agency fully intended to carry out.
This riveting and important story based on multiple sources might be expected to attract extensive coverage and widespread editorial comment in the British media, not to mention in parliament. Many newspapers have dutifully carried summaries of the investigation, but there has been no furor. Striking gaps in the coverage include the BBC, which only reported it, so far as I can see, as part of its Somali service. Channel 4, normally so swift to defend freedom of expression, apparently did not mention the story at all.
In the event, the embassy attack never took place, despite the advanced planning. “There was a discussion with the Brits about turning the other cheek or looking the other way when a team of guys went inside and did a rendition,” said a former senior US counter-intelligence official, who added that the British had refused to allow the operation to take place.
But the British government did carry out its own less melodramatic, but more effective measure against Assange, removing him from the embassy on 11 April 2019 after a new Ecuador government had revoked his asylum. He remains in Belmarsh top security prison two-and-a-half years later while the US appeals a judicial decision not to extradite him to the US on the grounds that he would be a suicide risk.
If he were to be extradited, he would face 175 years in prison. It is important, however, to understand, that only five of these would be under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, while the other 170 potential years are under the Espionage Act of 1917, passed during the height of the patriotic war fever as the US entered the First World War.
Only a single minor charge against Assange relates to the WikiLeaks disclosure in 2010 of a trove of US diplomatic cables and army reports relating to the Iraq and Afghan wars. The other 17 charges are to do with labeling normal journalistic investigation as the equivalent of spying.
Pompeo’s determination to conflate journalistic inquiry with espionage has particular relevance in Britain, because the home secretary, Priti Patel, wants to do much the same thing. She proposes updating the Official Secrets Act so that journalists, whistle-blowers and leakers could face sentences of up to 14 years in prison. A consultative paper issued in May titled Legislation to Counter State Threats (Hostile State Activity) redefines espionage as “the covert process of obtaining sensitive confidential information that is not normally publicly available”.
The true reason the scoop about the CIA’s plot to kidnap or kill Assange has been largely ignored or downplayed is rather that he is unfairly shunned as a pariah by all political persuasions: left, right and centre.
To give but two examples, the US government has gone on claiming that the disclosures by WikiLeaks in 2010 put the lives of US agents in danger. Yet the US Army admitted in a court hearing in 2013 that a team of 120 counter-intelligence officers had failed to find a single person in Iraq and Afghanistan who had died because of the disclosures by WikiLeaks. As regards the rape allegations in Sweden, many feel that these alone should deny Assange any claim to be a martyr in the cause of press freedom. Yet the Swedish prosecutor only carried out a “preliminary investigation” and no charges were brought.
Assange is a classic victim of “cancel culture”, so demonised that he can no longer get a hearing, even when a government plots to kidnap or murder him.
In reality, Khashoggi and Assange were pursued relentlessly by the state because they fulfilled the primary duty of journalists: finding out important information that the government would like to keep secret and disclosing it to the public.
Patrick Cockburn is the author of War in the Age of Trump (Verso).
Norway led the way in 25 years of clean-up of Russia’s dead nuclear submarine radioactive trash
Andreyeva Bay evolved into a dumping ground for 22,000 spent nuclear fuel assemblies offloaded from hundreds of Soviet submarines. Cracks in storage pools made worse by the hard Arctic freeze threatened to contaminate the Barents Sea. At one point, experts even feared the radioactive morgue might spark an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction.
Norway has led the pack by far, contributing some $220 million over the past 20 years toward safely removing Andreyeva Bay’s spend nuclear fuel – a national movement spawned when Bellona published its first report on Northwest Russia’s nuclear hazards in 1996.
Norway and Russia mark 25 years of cooperative work on radiation security https://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/2021-10-norway-and-russia-mark-25-years-of-cooperative-work-on-radiation-se 4 Oct 21
Two and a half decades ago, a green four-car train would make the rounds every few months of Russia’s icy Kola Peninsula to cart nuclear fuel and radioactive waste 3,000 kilometers south to the Ural Mountains. October 4, 2021 by Charles Digges
Two and a half decades ago, a green four-car train would make the rounds every few months of Russia’s icy Kola Peninsula to cart nuclear fuel and radioactive waste 3,000 kilometers south to the Ural Mountains.
At the time, that lonely rail artery was the center of a logistical and financial bottleneck that made Northwest Russia – home of the once feared Soviet nuclear fleet – a toxic nuclear dumping ground shrouded in military secrecy.
Nearly 200 rusted out submarines bobbed in icy waters at bases throughout the region, their reactors still loaded with nuclear fuel, vulnerable to sinking or worse. Further from shore and under the waves laid other submarines and nuclear waste intentionally scuttled by the Soviet navy. Still more radioactive spent fuel was piling up in storage tanks and open-air bins on military bases and in shipyards.
One of those places was Andreyeva Bay, a run-down nuclear submarine maintenance yard just 55 kilometers from the Norwegian border.
Since the birth of the nuclear navy in the 1960s, Andreyeva Bay evolved into a dumping ground for 22,000 spent nuclear fuel assemblies offloaded from hundreds of Soviet submarines. Cracks in storage pools made worse by the hard Arctic freeze threatened to contaminate the Barents Sea. At one point, experts even feared the radioactive morgue might spark an uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction.
Infrastructure, technology and the Kremlin were failing to keep up with the mushrooming catastrophe. That green nuclear fuel train could only bear away 588 fuel assemblies at a time three or four times a year – little more than the contents of one nuclear submarine per trip. Even if the train ran on schedule, removing broken or deformed nuclear fuel elements at Andreyeva Bay was still seen as impossible
In the bleak and politically chaotic late 1990s, many feared that the carcinogenic remains of the Cold War would lie neglected at Andreyeva Bay for decades more.
“Now, after more than two decades of international effort spearheaded by Bellona, nearly all of those threats are already – or nearly – the stuff of history,” says Oskar Njaa, Bellona’ general manager for international affairs.
Those efforts have been backed by more than $200 million in funding from Norway, which, in 1996, became the first western government to recognize the new Russia’s emerging crisis over its radioactive legacy.
Norway’s financial foray into northwest Russia paved the way for yet more funding from the West, as numerous other European nations pitched in to help.
Last week, officials from both sides of the border gathered at Andreyeva Bay – now the flagship project between the two nations – to mark the 25th anniversary of the Norwegian-Russian Commission on Nuclear Safety.
“Bellona became the first organization in the world to publish such a name ‘Andreyeva Bay,’ and also told about the facility itself and its condition, ”said Alexander Nikitin, who directs Bellona’s St Petersburg offices, and was the first to sound the alarm.
“It was in 1996. After that, the object drew the close attention of the international community and international projects began.”
The first containers of Andreyeva’s accumulated waste were packed up in 2017 and borne away on a specially outfitted ship called the Rossita – itself a bit of expertise donated by Italy under the Northern Dimensions Environmental Partnership, an enormous Russian nuclear cleanup fund managed by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development.
To date, the Rossita has made 15 trips, bearing away 10,000 spent nuclear fuel assemblies for reprocessing in the Urals, representing 45% of the total assemblies at the site.
According to Anatoly Grigoriev, who heads up the international projects division of Rosatom, Russia’s state nuclear corporation, the cleanup will continue for another six to seven years.
“Andreyeva Bay has been a daunting task for Norway,” said Per Einar Fiskebek, an advisor to the governor of Tromsø and Finnmark Counties, the Norwegian border region closest to Andreyeva Bay. “It is especially important for us that the work be carried out absolutely safely for the personnel, who have been professionally coping with it even in a pandemic. Norway and Russia are good neighbors with a common border and nature. I can assure you that Norway will remain with Russia until the end, until Andreeva Bay becomes absolutely clean.”
Cracks and contamination
Andreyeva Bay had been piling up spent nuclear submarine fuel for more than two decades when its troubles began in earnest in 1982.
That year, a crack developed in its now-notorious Building 5, a storage pool for thousands of spent fuel assemblies. The ensuing leak threatened to dump a stew of plutonium, uranium and other fission products into Litsa Fjord, fouling the Barents Sea.
The water was drained and the fuel painstakingly moved, but that revealed other problems. The fuel elements from Building 5 needed somewhere to go, so they were rushed into hastily arranged storage facilities that were meant only to be temporary.
Technicians stuffed the fuel elements into three dry storage buildings and cemented them in. The temporary storage solution has now spanned the last 30 years. . Meanwhile the leaking radioactive water contaminated much of the soil around Building 5.
It took the government years to catch up to the problem. In 1995, the Murmansk regional government paid it first visit to the secretive military site and, based on what it saw, shut down its operations. Five years later Moscow finally got involved, taking Andreyeva Bay out of the military’s hands, and giving it to the mainly civilian Ministry of Atomic Energy, now Rosatom.
Rosatom helped create a nuclear waste-handling agency in Murmansk, called SevRAO, to deal with the problem. Yet even in 2000, SevRAO was essentially working from scratch. Rosatom officials noted that there weren’t even documents detailing what waste and fuel was stored where at the site, much less an infrastructure to help safely get rid of it.
Bellona leads the charge
Norway, at Bellona’s urging, led the charge to pitch in.
Finally, in 2001, an enclosure was built over the three storage buildings to prevent further contamination while technicians worked to remove the spent fuel and load it into cases. Roads were built and cranes were brought in. Personnel decontamination posts went up, along with a laboratory complex and power lines.
A host of nations pumped funding into the burgeoning city whose central industry was safely packing up decades of nuclear fuel from Russia’s past nuclear soldiers. Starting in 2003, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, Canada and Great Britain, joined by Finland, Denmark, Sweden, and the European Commission pooled resources for a total contribution of $70 million over several years.
But Norway has led the pack by far, contributing some $220 million over the past 20 years toward safely removing Andreyeva Bay’s spend nuclear fuel – a national movement spawned when Bellona published its first report on Northwest Russia’s nuclear hazards in 1996.
“I hope that the system will take care of the future nuclear legacy without waiting for it to be accumulated,” Nikitin told The Independent Barents Observer. “Nuclear and radioactive waste should be dealt with before it reaches a situation as we had in Soviet times.”
As the project continues, Nikitin said he is pleased to see how the work has progressed.
“Bellona started it, and we have to finish it,” he told the portal.
Japan’s independent English language newsletter, analysing nuclear issues, is struggling to survive
Japan NPO on nuke power issues struggling to retain English newsletter
September 27, 2021 (Mainichi Japan TOKYO (Kyodo) — A citizens’ organization in Japan that publishes independent analysis in English on nuclear power issues is struggling financially, threatening its ability to remain the major source of specialized public information on Japan’s nuclear industry for an international audience.
The Citizens’ Nuclear Information Center based in Tokyo has published the free bimonthly English newsletter Nuke Info Tokyo since 1987 but is having to crowdfund to keep publishing amid financial difficulties caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
The nonprofit organization, which also produces a monthly newsletter in Japanese for a domestic audience, had previously financed the cost of the English publication by holding paid seminars at which it also solicited donations and sold books, as well as collecting membership fees.
But it has been unable to hold the events since early 2020 when coronavirus infections began to impact Japan, Hajime Matsukubo, CNIC secretary general, told Kyodo News.
Membership — already in decline — has also dropped further amid the pandemic and its effect on the economy, he said.
“Membership decreased by about 100 last year alone under the coronavirus outbreaks and (membership) is around 2,100 now,” Matsukubo said, admitting the decline in membership also owed to a waning of public interest in nuclear issues in recent years.
…………. Philip White, a former editor of Nuke Info Tokyo, wrote that he fielded calls around the clock from the foreign media by referring to the archived English-language articles at the time of the disaster.
“The international media was hungry for critical information to counter the sanitized version offered by the government and the nuclear industry. Our English website offered clearly referenced Nuke Info Tokyo articles,” he wrote……………
Matsukubo argues that the government and electric power companies operating nuclear plants tend to withhold information, not just when accidents occur but also in normal times.
Although the government has said the Fukushima plant is under control, it is uncertain how many more years it will take to deal with over a million tons of treated radioactive water from the plant and decommission damaged reactors.
The government continues to deem nuclear power a major energy source, although, since 2014, it has said it aims to decrease its reliance on such power.
Running the English newsletter, staffed by Stronell, four freelance translators, and an editor who is also co-director of the group, costs around 1.5 million yen ($13,700) per year. While the translators used to work voluntarily, CNIC started to pay them in 2009 — though they receive half or less than the market rate.
At this time, the newsletter, which had been printed and mailed to readers with a postage fee charged only to readers in Japan, was made available for free online. Several hundred readers regularly refer to the newsletter, among them journalists, NGO staff, and academics.
Another co-director of CNIC, Hideyuki Ban, said that researchers worldwide have quoted Nuke Info Tokyo in their work.
“Nuke Info Tokyo is the only newsletter in English that specializes in the situation of nuclear power in Japan and has covered a wide range of issues from citizens’ standpoints for decades,” Ban said.
CNIC was founded in 1975 by scientists, including the late Jinzaburo Takagi, a nuclear chemist who began his career in the nuclear industry but later voiced concerns about atomic power……..
To coincide with the policy discussion, CNIC held a virtual seminar on Friday to draw attention to the issues and help people make up their minds on the right policy for Japan.
Stronell said she hopes to run an article on the seminar given by experts in the newsletter.
“I think the most important thing is having independent experts’ information on nuclear power accidents like Fukushima and other problems to let people make decisions about their own health and future,” Stronell said. “And so for us to continue to do this, and that’s what the crowdfunding project is about, any support is very much appreciated.” https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20210927/p2g/00m/0na/078000c
Vested interests — controlling the news about nuclear safety
Who controls the truth about a nuclear disaster?
The end of the monopoly of these experts would allow a proper debate on the risks of nuclear energy. At a time when many voices are speaking out in favor of the development of atomic energy as the lesser evil in the face of climate change, such a debate is urgent.
How monolithic institutions decide what is safe for the rest of us, Beyond Nuclear, By Christine Fassert and Tatiana Kasperski, 12 Sept 21,
In December 2020, twenty years after the final closure of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the Ministry of Culture of Ukraine announced its intention to prepare an application to include certain objects in the exclusion zone around Chernobyl in the UNESCO World Heritage List….
The Chernobyl site would symbolize the long history of accidents that have marked the atomic age, from Kychtym and Windscale (1957), to Three Mile Island (1979) and Fukushima (2011), whose tenth anniversary we commemorated this year.
Moreover, the Chernobyl accident constitutes a particular moment in this history, namely the beginning of the institutionalization of the international management of the consequences of nuclear accidents, whose impact became fully apparent at the time of the Fukushima accident.
A small group of organizations
If the origins of accidents are most often explained by factors related to the development of the nuclear industry and its regulatory bodies at the national level, the “management” of their consequences gradually extends beyond national borders
In this respect, Chernobyl established the monopolization of the authoritative knowledge of ionizing radiation by a small group of organizations — the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the International Commission on Radiological Protection (ICRP) and the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR).
Through a series of alliances and co-options, these organizations formed a monolithic bloc on the issue of radiological risk.
Relegated to a militant marginality
From that moment on, divergent points of view were de-legitimized and relegated to a form of militant marginality. These included the positions of such individuals as “dissident” scientist Keith Baverstock who directed the radiation protection program at the World Health Organization’s Regional Office for Europe, and those of such organizations as the International Association of Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW).
This monopoly translates into an internationalization of accident management that relies on a series of tools designed to establish a “normalization” of the post accident situation through the depoliticization of the management of risks related to radioactive fallout. They enshrine the power of experts close to international nuclear organizations to determine what sacrifices in terms of health and the environment are acceptable.
As physicists Bella and Roger Belbéoch point out:
“Far from calling into question the power they have secured for themselves in society, the nuclear disaster allows them to constitute themselves into a unified international body with even greater powers. It is at the moment when the scientific experts can no longer promise anything other than disaster management that their power inevitably takes hold.”
Fukushima
This monopoly over knowledge and management of an accident was very much present in Japan in 2011, when the Japanese authorities put in place measures, which, by largely referring to international standards, warded off objections: the accident was dealt with by the experts.
However, a shift occurred in this monopoly when a UN rapporteur, Anand Grover, severely criticized Tokyo’s management of the disaster.
At the same time, new conceptual tools proposed by the social sciences, such as the “production of ignorance”, offer a framework for analysis that makes it possible to extend the criticisms beyond the domain of a purely expert debate, opening the way to a re-politicization of the accident and its consequences.
Making nuclear accidents manageable
But, first of all, how can you make a nuclear accident manageable when, as was the case at Chernobyl and Fukushima, it causes very large releases of radioactive particles, spreading around the globe and causing long-term contamination of tens of thousands of square kilometers?
Hundreds of thousands of people have been evacuated or relocated from these territories, and hundreds of thousands of others continue to live in an environment affected by radioactivity.
Zoning, that is, the division of these territories into several “zones” according to the density of contamination and the necessary protective measures, was the first instrument that made it possible, in Japan and in the former Soviet Union, to make the accident manageable……
This zoning mechanism set up by the Japanese government is part of a regulatory framework established by the two major international nuclear institutions, the IAEA and the ICRP. The ICRP sets the dose limit for the public at 1 millisievert (mSv)/year. Since 2007, the ICRP has authorized government authorities to raise this threshold (from 1 to 20 mSv/year) in the case of a nuclear accident.
When the Japanese authorities, like the Soviet authorities in 1986, chose to raise the threshold following the accident, they justified it in terms of the virtual absence of any health risks.
The radiological threshold
The mechanism is based in particular on the choice of a radiological threshold from which the population will be evacuated.
In Japan, government officials consider that the risk of developing cancer from exposure to a dose of 100mSv or less is so low according to “the international (scientific) consensus, (that) it is made undetectable by the carcinogenic effects of other factors.”
Limiting evacuations and compensations
The sociologist and historian of science Sezin Topçu shows how this zoning mechanism, which has become an indispensable element of nuclear accident management, is above all a way of limiting evacuation and compensation for damage caused by an accident, since its costs (economic, political or social) would be prohibitive for the nuclear industry and the State.
This optimization approach is also enshrined at the international level in the recommendations issued by the IAEA and the ICRP.
For example, in the case of Japan, the threshold of 20 mSv/year appears to have been chosen in part to avoid evacuating the Naka Dori region and its major cities: the established zone borders made it possible to exclude such cities in the center of the prefecture, including Fukushima, from evacuation orders…………………………..
Mechanisms of ignorance production
More recently, however, various social scientists have proposed an analysis of the promotion of a reassuring stance on these dangers as part of the mechanisms of ignorance production.
The production of ignorance, which can be both involuntary and intentional, was initially studied for a number of risks, such as tobacco.
Approaching radiological risks in terms of the production of ignorance makes it possible to break with the “exceptionalism” with which the nuclear issue has long been associated, and to consider the dangers of ionizing radiation within the broader field of health risks and its banal issues of power.
Minimizing gravity
The internationalized management of nuclear disasters is in fact based on various mechanisms of ignorance production. For instance, the sociologist of science, Olga Kuchinskaya,- describes the “politics of invisibility” that were adopted after the Chernobyl disaster.
She points out that the public visibility of the effects of ionizing radiation depends on the existence of material infrastructures – such as measuring devices, information systems and equipment — but also institutional infrastructures (for example, following a cohort of people in order to make health effects visible depends on this articulation between material and institutional elements).
This infrastructure is very costly and, in the case of Chernobyl, has not been maintained over time. Moreover, the assessment of the effects of radiation was essentially taken care of by international institutions, while local doctors and researchers, for their part, revealed a completely different and much more alarming picture of the health situation.
Kate Brown describes how various international bodies, primarily the IAEA and WHO, worked to redefine the health effects of Chernobyl, to minimize their severity, and thus actively to produce “ignorance” about the impact of the disaster.
This non-knowledge was in fact a crucial instrument that made the disaster “manageable” and allowed, as Adriana Petryna points out, “the deployment of authoritative knowledge, especially when applied to the management of the exposed population”.
The monopoly of international experts, until when?
By addressing the “exceptional” character of nuclear energy and ionizing radiation, these criticisms, whether they are made within UN bodies or by social science researchers, open the way to questioning the monopoly of international nuclear institutions in assessing radiological risk and framing so-called “post-accident” policies.
A re-politicization of the management of accident consequences that brings the “management” of a nuclear accident into the broader framework of human rights therefore becomes possible.
When the next nuclear accident occurs, it is not a given that citizens will accept the “inevitability” of the power of international experts to decide, on their behalf, what constitutes an acceptable risk.
The end of the monopoly of these experts would allow a proper debate on the risks of nuclear energy. At a time when many voices are speaking out in favor of the development of atomic energy as the lesser evil in the face of climate change, such a debate is urgent.
This article was first published in The Conversation in French on April 26, 2021, as well as on Beyond Nuclear International. English translation provided by the authors.
Christine Fassert is a social anthropologist at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Tatiana Kasperski is a research associate– Department of Humanities at Universitat Pompeu Fabra https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2021/09/12/vested-interests/
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